My 15-team NFBC Main Event league took place this morning at a hotel conference room in midtown Manhattan. The Main Event consists of 32 15-team leagues that compete both for their individual league prizes ($6,500 for 1st, $3,200 for 2nd, $1600 for 3rd) and also for overall prizes ($125K for 1st) among the 480 total contestants. The overall works much the same way as the smaller leagues do, only instead of 15 points for being first in a category, you get 480 points if you’re first, 479 if you’re second… all the way down to one point if you’re 480th.

The offseason couldn’t have started much better for Pat Mahomes, as the Chiefs announced that they were shipping Alex Smith off to the Redskins and handing the starting QB job to their young signal caller. As great as his opportunity appeared to be, it got a whole lot better on the first day of free agency.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from TeamRankings.com, a site that has provided data-driven bracket tools and analysis since 2004. They also offerpremium bracket picks.

When it comes to picking a bracket, there are no golden rules. Every tournament, every team, and every potential path to the Sweet 16 is different.

Even the usually-smart bracket advice of picking undervalued teams (e.g., teams that have a better chance to make the Sweet 16 than the public is giving them, based on pick popularity data from nationwide bracket contests) isn’t all that easy in practice.

For example, it’s simple enough to identify undervalued teams using win odds and pick popularity data. However, it’s a whole lot harder to figure out how many of those value picks you should make, or exactly where in your bracket you should make them.

Balancing Risk vs. Reward In Your Bracket

One of the key goals of smart bracket strategy is to make sure that the risk/reward profile of your bracket as a whole makes sense for your specific pool’s characteristics (e.g. its scoring system, size, and other factors). Make too many value-driven picks in a small pool, for instance, and you may end up with a bracket that is too risky overall, thus lowering your odds to win.

This leaves out numerous middle-round arms I like (Lance McCullers, Jeff Samardzija, Garrett Richards, Danny Duffy and Kevin Gausman included), and I chose not to include injured but hyped Ervin Santana.

I came across an interesting article by Fangraphs’ Mike Podhorzer on Twitter this morning, wherein he shows that last year’s breakouts typically fail to earn their keep the following. It’s well worth a read. But I started wondering to what extent they fail relative to every expensive player. Because – after all – every top-50 list fails in the aggregate to live up to its preseason billing for the simple reason that players outside the top-50 before the year will wind up on it by year’s end. There’s nowhere to go but down for every set of players in the Top-10, Top-20, Top-x.

For the uninitiated, LABR (pronounced “labor”) stands for League of Alternative Baseball Reality. Founded in 1994, it was the first high-profile experts league of its kind. Check out its Wikipedia page.

To say it’s a tremendous honor to be a part of the league would be a huge understatement. The entire weekend is a blast, hanging out in Arizona and talking baseball with the best minds in the industry.

There were a few of key lessons I learned in my first year. My crucial mistakes:

I didn’t spread my budget around as well as I should have and ended up with three $1 hitters on my team (four $1 players total).

I valued volume over skills too much on the pitching side.

With that in mind, and with a core of key players pinpointed that I wanted to build around — Giancarlo Stanton, Blake Snell, Mike Clevinger, Wilson Ramos, Dustin Fowler, Blake Treinen, Keone Kela, and A.J. Puk were all players that I knew I liked more than most — I set about creating what will hopefully be a championship-winning team.